It's the end of the world as you know it – brought to you by a Gnome Mage with big balls of fire

Legitimate twinks: Our Parent’s ‘fess up

So the bastard sons and daughters will be acknowledged by their father in patch 3.2.

Now of course for many years now many players have considered twinkers bastards, especially when they enter battlegrounds with their stock standard toons for a bit of fun to break up the leveling grind.

I had a quick look through the patch notes this morning and noted that coming in patch 3.2 is the ability to stop earning XP.

This is awesome news on a whole lot of different levels, so let’s cover some of them.

Pick your bracket and hang there

One of the issues with twinking is unwanted or accidental experience.

Want to join in on holiday events – XP rewards prevent this.

Need to travel somewhere, travel Xp is a danger.

Want a change from the battlegrounds -better use another toon or risk loosing your bracket.

Now you will be able to do more with your twink without risking earning that 1 XP that pushes you out of the bracket.

Less pressure on grinding twink gear.

Likewise, you needed to plan early in your toon’s career to pick up all the best twink gear. Now, you could in theory, level to 19 normally, then stop XP gains while you go run the required instances and quests collecting the gear. As many times as you need to.

Enjoy the rest of the game at your chosen level.

In many ways this isn’t just limited to twinks. Maybe you want to explore all the level 1-19 content without out leveling it. Now you can. In theory you could continue to pick levels that you wanted to stop at and enjoy the view.

More toons available for old world content.

One of the big complaints of anyone that is leveling a new toon is the lack of equivalent level toons around.

Want to run Deadmines… Good luck finding a group! Most people need to grab a friendly high level toon to boost them through.

The change here is that now twinks can run these instances without fear of changing bracket. There are bound to be lots of players that are tired of the level 80 game, and will want to run their twinks through the old content.

Sure, you are still being boosted to some extent. A well geared twink is the equivalent of several levels higher than their toon suggests, but a level 19 twink will still be challenged where a level 80 won’t.

Twink v. Twink

If you turn off the experience point gains, then WoW will consider you to be a Twink…

In future, when you enter the battlegrounds, you will only face off against Twinks…

All the other toons that happen to be at the same level, but want the experience rewards will be facing of against others in the same camp… thus less Twinks to beat you to a pulp. (Less because there may still be some twinks in the BG that have all the twink gear, but can handle a bit more XP.)

It comes at a price.

Of course it comes at a cost, but then anyone that has ever twinked knows you don’t log on without it costing a few gold. To get fully geared it will cost you in excess of 1,000 gold, so what’s 10 gold to prevent accidental levelling and allow you to enjoy so much more of the game?

Cost to Auctioneers
The bigger cost will come to avid auctioneers in the way of lost income. If a twink can stop xp gains at any point, they can now go and grind instances as many times as required to pick up their gear, both BoP and BoE.

There will still be some twinkers that would rather spend the gold than spend the time getting the gear, but I think the market will fall significantly, in part because twinks grinding instances will also make the BoEs more plentiful on the AH.

Alternatively

If you happen to love your battlegrounds, or are maybe a hardcore RPer wanting to level your toon through the war effort as expressed by the battlegrounds, you will now be able to earn XP by completing PvP objectives (not honor kills).

I dare say it will be difficult to level from 1-80 purely via PvP. The early levels in each bracket will be hell for most characters. Still, the possibility remains, and imagine the honor and PvP tokens you would have stashed away through pure PvP leveling.

If nothing else, this is a great opportunity for the x7-x9 characters to take a break from the PvE content, quests and grinding and enjoy a few levels of PvP per decade. Now it won’t mean a complete halt to your leveling.

Best of both worlds!

Hierloom PvP gear

There’s just one more change I think I would like to see.

Aurdon mentioned this morning that Twinking was already legitimized via the heirloom items. I disagree to a point. The heirloom items can be beneficial to twinks, but really they are designed to buff the leveling experience for those raising Alts.

What I would like to see is some heirloom PvP gear.

Kindergarten Gladiator gear

Primary School Gladiator gear

High School Gladiator gear

Something built with PvP in mind, but purchased in the same manner as current heirloom gear.

Mage notes

On a slightly different note, Mages got some patch note “love” too.

Well, if you consider 3 lines love…

Still, I must say I am happy with an uninterruptable Invisibility… just need Evocate to join the club and there will be cheers all round!

Finally!! And this isn’t just limited to BGs. Now you can stop leveling at 60 (or 63) and experience the Vanilla Endgame. Raiders who get tired of Ulduar can form an alt guild that raids the earlier content.

Now that we fundamentally have the No1. request (introduce Vanilla servers) covered, but with the added bonus of ongoing support, we just need for No2. request to be filled… bring in real Oceanic servers.

@shadowygoodness, that is something I haven’t thought about, I’m excitd to see some end game vanilla content, punched up a bit with some outlad gear at 61-3ish! This is a better way of using the experience turn off for other reasons!